The afternoon sun hung warm and golden over the floating peaks of the Radiant Dawn Academy.
On the Second Spire, rumors were already spreading like a gale-force wildfire.
Prince Kenneth—the proud, invincible First Sword of the Blade Spire—had returned from Solitude Spire with his white wind-griffon walking on trembling legs.
He carried no spoils of war.
His gleaming silver cuirass was coated in chicken feathers and driveway dust, his ancestral *Heaven-Slicing Rapier* was broken into three sacred shards, and he was currently weeping in the inner shrine, refusing to touch a weapon ever again while babbling about the "Dao of the Broken Edge."
Master Vane had locked himself in his sword-forge in a state of catatonic shock.
On Solitude Spire, however, life remained delightfully, aggressively boring.
Inside the small cedar cottage, Barnaby the clockwork owl sat upon his ceiling perch, his beak firmly stopped with Felix’s trusty rubber stopper.
Tiny gears whirred frantically inside the bird’s brass cranium.
His amber crystal eyes flashed with desperate, pent-up frustration as he tried to screech his 1:00 PM motivational aphorism (*"The heavens favor the early riser! Sloth is the venom of the soul!"*).
All that emerged from his stoppered beak was a muffled, vibrating buzz:
*"Mmph-whirrrr-clack."*
On the porch outside, Felix Vance lay comfortably in his canvas hammock, suspended between the two iron-wood trees.
He had one knee crossed over the other, swinging gently in the mountain breeze, an empty ceramic bowl of jasmine tea resting on the floorboards beside him.
Nearby on the porch steps, Lyra Ashford sat with her silver rapier resting across her knees.
She was staring down at her gleaming blade with an expression of profound, agonizing spiritual conflict.
*Should I break it?* Lyra pondered in desperate silence, her fingers lightly tracing the cold steel. *Senior Brother shattered Kenneth's meteoric blade with an idle flick of his elbow to awaken him to the Formless Dao! If I hold onto my mother's heirloom... am I clinging to mortal vanity? Am I unworthy of the Void?*
She raised her knee, tentatively preparing to snap her rapier in half over her thigh.
Before she could commit spiritual vandalism, a sharp, upbeat retro chime rang out from Felix’s hammock.
*Ding-ding-dong-da-ding!*
Lyra froze, instantly lowering her sword and turning toward the hammock with rapt attention.
Inside the hammock, Felix’s eyes cracked open.
He slid the obsidian slate from his sleeve and brought it before his face.
The display was exploding with golden digital fireworks and sparkling 8-bit confetti:
Felix stared at the flashing screen, a slow, genuine smile spreading across his face.
"Oh, sweet mercy," Felix breathed, his gamer soul rejoicing. "Base defense automation! Finally!"
Nothing irritated Felix more in idle farming games than manual pest control.
Having to log in every two hours just to chase away digital crows and keep cabbage durability from dropping was the bane of his existence.
"Automated scarecrows that boost crop yields by twenty percent?" Felix chuckled happily. "Now that is what I call quality-of-life game design."
He immediately tapped `[PLACE ASSETS NOW]`.
The obsidian screen transformed into a top-down, bird's-eye grid of Solitude Spire's front yard.
Two small, pixelated wooden scarecrows with straw hats and burlap faces sat in the inventory bar at the bottom of the screen.
Felix used his thumb to drag the first scarecrow across the virtual lawn.
"Let’s put one right by the northern fence corner, next to the cabbage bed," Felix murmured, tapping the brass confirm button.
He dragged the second scarecrow to the opposite side of the yard.
"And the second one goes by the southern gate near the gravel path, covering the blind spot."
*Tap. Confirm.*
On the screen, two green checkmarks lit up: `[Placement Successful: Automated Defenses Active]`.
***
Outside in the physical yard, reality groaned under the weight of ancient cosmic authority.
*THUD. THUD.*
Two violent, muffled impacts shook the turf.
At the northern corner of the cabbage garden and the southern gatepost, the earth split open.
Two thick, weathered posts of ancient petrified iron-oak burst from the ground, planting themselves three feet deep into the granite bedrock.
Crossbeams snapped into place with the crack of thunder.
Draped across the wooden frames were coarse, hemp burlap sacks, cinched at the neck with rough twine and stuffed with dry golden straw.
Perched atop their wooden heads were two floppy, weathered straw hats, tilted slightly forward to shield their faces from the sun.
To an ordinary mortal observer, they looked like two completely mundane, slightly crooked scarecrows assembled by a lazy farmer on a weekend afternoon.
Felix poked his head over the edge of the hammock, looked at them, and nodded in satisfaction.
"Rustic," Felix remarked. "A little crooked, but they fit the aesthetic. As long as they keep the birds off the Sun-Lotus Cabbage, I don't care what they look like."
However, beneath the rustic hemp cloth and dry straw, the universe was singing a song of terrifying annihilation.
Because Felix’s 1.0-Earth-Mass stellar core was constantly venting microscopic fractions of high-density True Yang solar mana, the two scarecrows were instantly saturated with planetary authority.
The petrified iron-oak posts didn't just hold up straw.
Deep inside the wood, glowing crimson runes of the *Tenth-Tier God-Slaying Sky-Array* burned into the grain like molten iron.
The coarse hemp burlap was woven with invisible threads of dense gravitational flux.
And beneath the brim of those floppy straw hats, two pairs of glowing golden plasma eyes ignited in the shadows, scanning the upper atmosphere with sub-atomic precision.
Felix focused his gaze on the northern scarecrow.
His passive Inspector HUD obligingly pulled up its technical specifications:
Felix chuckled softly, shaking his head.
"Gotta love flavor text," Felix muttered, resting the slate on his chest. "Developers always write the most dramatic descriptions for basic farm utility items. 'Anti-Intruder Atmospheric Cleansing Protocol.' It's literally just a bird-shooer on a stick."
Meanwhile, thirty thousand feet above Solitude Spire, hidden deep within the dense cirrus clouds, a shadow glided in circles.
This was no ordinary bird.
It was a flock of thirty-six *Abyssal Shadow-Crows*—ancient Seventh-Tier demonic familiars bred by the Black Viper Intelligence Guild of the Western Imperial Court.
Their feathers absorbed all light, making them completely invisible to standard detection arrays.
Their ruby eyes were linked directly to a scrying pool in the Western Sky-Empire, transmitting live visual intelligence back to three Imperial Arch-Spies who had been dispatched to investigate the rumors of the "slumbering sun deity."
*The target is isolated on the porch,* the flock's hive-mind whispered through the astral link.
*He is defenseless, swinging in a canvas hammock. No mana shields detected. Initiating dive-reconnaissance to probe his spiritual baseline.*
The thirty-six shadow-crows tucked their wings and plunged downward like silent black arrows, screaming through the cloud deck at five hundred miles per hour.
Down in the garden, the southern scarecrow stood motionless.
The mountain breeze gently rustled its frayed hemp sleeves.
Then, the scarecrow’s floppy straw hat tilted upward by roughly three millimeters.
Deep within the shadowed burlap face, two golden pinpricks of pure thermonuclear plasma flared to life.
There was no sound.
There was no incantation.
There was no theatrical display of sword-light.
A single, invisible pencil-thin beam of concentrated gamma-ray radiation shot straight upward from the scarecrow's right eye, piercing thirty thousand feet of atmosphere in less than a microsecond.
*FZZZZZZT.*
High above in the cirrus clouds, the thirty-six Seventh-Tier Abyssal Shadow-Crows didn't even have time to shriek.
The invisible beam swept across the flock in a microscopic arc.
Instantly, all thirty-six demonic familiars were cleansed at the atomic level.
Their feathers, their bones, their demonic blood, and their astral cores were vaporized into sparkling, harmless cosmic ash that dissolved into the wind like morning mist.
None of the thirty-six crows survived.
Zero drops of black blood fell.
Even the cloud bank thirty thousand feet up was neatly punched through, leaving a perfectly round, six-foot hole of clear blue sky in the overcast firmament.
Twelve miles away, in the high tower of the Third Spire, Chief Diviner Moros was peering into a massive obsidian scrying basin, tracking the mysterious energy fluctuations above Solitude Spire.
Suddenly, the surface of the scrying basin flashed with blinding ultraviolet light.
*CRACK-SHATTER!*
The four-thousand-year-old enchanted basin shattered into ten thousand smoking fragments, splashing boiling scrying fluid across the flagstones.
Moros was blown backward into a bookshelf, his spectacles flying off his nose as he landed in a heap of ancient astrological scrolls.
"A-A-Annihilation ray!" Moros shrieked, clutching his singed beard as tears of pure horror flooded his eyes. "From the garden! A stratospheric divine pulse of pure True Yang fire! It wiped out an entire legion of Abyssal beasts with a single blink!"
"Who fired it?!" a terrified apprentice screamed, helping the old diviner to his feet. "Was it Grandmaster Vivienne?!"
"No!" Moros sobbed, trembling uncontrollably. "It was... it was a mannequin stuffed with straw! The Ancient Sovereign has stationed Living War-Gods to guard his cabbage patch! The heavens have fallen! The heavens have truly fallen!"
Back on the porch of Solitude Spire, Lyra Ashford was still kneeling on the steps.
She had felt the instantaneous, terrifying spike of divine solar heat.
She had seen the brief, purple-white flash in the clouds above.
She looked up at the sky, witnessing the neat, cylindrical hole carved clean through the cloud ceiling.
Then, she looked back down at the two crooked scarecrows standing peacefully among the cabbage leaves.
The southern scarecrow’s straw hat had settled back down, shading its burlap face once more.
A small, harmless blue dragonfly landed gently on its wooden arm, completely unbothered.
Lyra’s breath caught in her throat.
Her jaw hung slack.
A cold sweat soaked through her silver-trimmed tunic.
*Tenth-Tier... God-Slaying Array Totems,* Lyra’s soul screamed in pure, unadulterated awe.
*He placed two ancient cosmic war-totems in his front yard... and disguised them as common garden scarecrows!*
*Thirty-six high-tier demonic stealth beasts were erased from existence before they could even cast a shadow on the dirt!*
*With these two guardians watching the perimeter, not even an Imperial Sky-Fleet could breach this mountain! He has turned this dilapidated junk peak into an impregnable divine sanctuary!*
Lyra slowly lowered her head, bowing deeply from the porch steps, tears of profound, terrifying gratitude stinging her eyes.
*Senior Brother’s realm is truly without limit,* she whispered to herself. *He protects this sanctuary with silent, effortless omnipotence... while lounging in a hammock.*
In the hammock, Felix glanced down at his AetherDeck.
The screen displayed a small, cheerful pop-up notification:
【 Auto-Turret Defense Log | Scarecrow AI Units | Target Scanned: 36x Airborne Pests | Result: Pinpoint Laser Purge (100% Accuracy) | Farmer Note: Clean sweep. No fertilizer required. 】
Felix gave a soft, contented hum, pulling the wool blanket up to his chin.
"Thirty-six pigeons in five minutes," Felix muttered to himself, shaking his head. "Told you this server had terrible pest spawn rates. Thank god for automation."
He set the AetherDeck on the wooden porch floor, closed his eyes, and rested his head against the soft down pillow.
Inside his chest, the 1.0-Earth-Mass stellar core continued its slow, rhythmic rotation, bathing his body in cozy fifteen-million-Kelvin warmth.
The breeze was cool.
The garden was secure.
The dailies were finished.
"Who is the archmage?" Felix Vance murmured into the peaceful afternoon air, his breathing slowing as he drifted off to sleep. "I am the archmage."
Ten seconds later, Senior Brother was sound asleep.